Wappler do a really impressive Wappler 2022 — Year in Review that looks very proffessional and demonstrates there is a lot going on at Wappler.
IMO this is the sort of thing that would really highlight what is capable with Stacks and show how much activity there has been in the last 12 months.
That’s the sad part of this.
I think RW and Stacks will survive, but not in the same way as before.
There will also be people who like me after using RW and Stacks for 12 years do not want to be in a position of being dependent on app+plugins, too many moving parts.
I’ve moved to a single integrated system and love it. No hassles in updating third party plugins and the nightmare of moving my installation to a new machine.
I just build the tool. You have to break it 😃
Great having Gary building some meaningful projects out of it 😅
I did a test run: I learned to do complex stuff pretty quick, in particular database interaction. Unfortunately it’s subscription based and the Pro is $49 a month. Because I only occasionally do web development— it’s not sustainable for me. Or so I thought; in hindsight it might not be true as my total costs of RW, Stacks and stacks is quite substantial.
I remember feeling kind of tricked when I purchased RW, as it couldn’t do the ‘cool stuff’ without Stacks. With Stacks came the stacks and soon I found myself victim to the classic Sunk Cost fallacy situation (something I warn my clients regularly about… 🫣🤫), not just money but time as well. RW never claimed it could (I can’t remember) but didn’t make it clear it couldn’t either. They most certainly happily piggybacked on the success stories, forums and websites of the stacks developers. Eventually all parties involved had egg on their face.
Introducing Stacks to new users won’t be different from launching a completely new product… without the help of the stacks developers. There’s sufficient social and technological proof that should convince new users. Though I do believe these new users aren’t the same users RW ‘officially’ or overtly pursues (and are happy with plain vanilla RW) but rather those that would (have) feel ‘tricked’ and, as Andrew wrote, basic users that moved away from using themes and are still quite new to “whole page” design, professional website designers and advanced enthusiasts.
Is there any evidence that RW are attracting the basic use template users?
MacFormat (or MacRumours) pointed out in their RW Classic review, that RW had not updated any of their standard themes in 5 years. By making RW Classic a recurring annual subscription, they just jumped into the Wix, Squarespace market.
When you add the cost of hosting to the yearly cost of RW Classic, you are paying the same as online web builder money, every 12 months.
From the top part of the RW page on their website:
Build Your Own Website with RapidWeaver
RapidWeaver for Mac is a powerful and easy to use website builder that puts you back in control. Build and publish your own responsive, mobile ready website without having to write a line of code.
“Your website”, not “websites”, not “for others”, not “your business”, etc.
Beautiful Themes
RapidWeaver comes with over 50 themes built-in and more available from the Marketplace.
Again piggybacking on devs…
And further down “Powerful features” — a non-basic user wouldn’t consider FTP, Addon manager, Resources manager, webicon generator as “powerful” and probably not even consider it “features”.
Then the showcases, it links to the showcases on the community. I wouldn’t be surprised if none of those is created by solely using RW: so without Stacks and without purchasing themes build by other devs.
Continuing with the reviews or testimonials: I recognize quite a few of them and they all use Stacks and a framework.
Finally we arrived at “Next Steps with RapidWeaver” where it makes clear, but not plainly, to get Stacks and Foundry. But not mentioning WHY to get those if we just were told that it could do all that stuff, nor how much extra dinero one has to cough up.
What makes me puke is in the footer (I copy pasted and the links came along with it)
Products
RapidWeaver
RapidWeaver Addons
Squash
DevAnt
As if the Addons are products of RMS, btw the link goes to the marketplace.
That’s by far my favourite part of the RM site.
Funny story. When RM built their previous site, as a proof of concept, I created a Template using Stacks with the best of the freely available stacks (Tav’s mostly) using the free blank Foundation theme. It’s just a basic template layout after all. This was long before Foundry was even released, yet you would not believe the stink that that caused.
So technically you dont need Foundry and you could build it with the free Source and create a faster site or in many other ways, I’m sure.
For me there are two questions here: ‘what can we demonstrate with RW/Stacks that would be impressive?’ and ‘who would be impressed enough to buy?’ It used to be that knocking together a real website in a few minutes was RW’s killer blow. Now you can do that anywhere. What is still impressive is what it’s possible to demonstrate with a £400-£450 setup (e.g. RW, Stacks, a framework, some heavyweight stacks, some utility stacks and some other useful little single purpose stacks). And the person who is going to be impressed is the one who needs to do more than Wix or Squarespace or Wordpress can deliver — possibly an ambitious site owner, or a professional designer. The heavyweight stacks (Total CMS, Sitelok, Poster, Agent, Datably/Feeds, Repository etc.) and the Swiss Army Knives (Source Grid, Sections, Limelight, Splider/Moving Box, Coder etc.) really do make all of the difference here. That‘s clearly the way Joe has gone, and I’d suggest it’s the way the whole platform needs to go.
Great questions. If we in this forum don’t know then how can any prospective new Stacks users possibly find out. There should be a true showcase of what can be built with Stacks.
Can you even point to such a site?
There should at least be one on Yourhead website. So far I can’t think of any with that specific purpose. For an insider the answer would be: your site, Foundation Box, RWpro.space, Stuarts pages, to name a few.
Something else, what’s flooding the internut these are “ reviewsl completely (I believe) generated by AI tools. For example this page. It’s so misleading and I doubt the “reviewer” ever worked with RW (or you wouldn’t keep referring to RW as Rapidweaver CMS). Try explaining RW/Stacks/stacks to someone who has been fed this nonsense. I think that Stacks Pro with it’s stacks would be free from that, though there is still the themes and stacks vs framework stacks hurdle.
And now we are back to the same point I was making at the beginning. My concerns were fragmentation, lack of information and lack of direction.
I agree with all these points, I don’t contest them, I’ll just say that first.
I’m quietly content that all is going to be good. Stacks App needs to get out first before marketing, nothing worse than a load of marketing or exposure and no product, difficult to get people to take a second look after firing the marketing gun. There is also the confusion at this current moment in time if Stacks is promoted now you have to be steered to RW, best wait until the standalone app is out. There are some Stack developers that have first class marketing skills, although at the moment within the RW/Stacks community because that is where it has always needed to be focussed, Joe Workman with his deals of the week, mailshots, hangouts etc. There are some developers that have fantastic gems of stacks, themes and templates but can be difficult to find and need to be discovered once you are in the ecosysatem. I well imagine plans and ideas are in place and being thought through to get Stacks App out to the wider public consciousness by folk that are savvy with connecting with an audience. It is not only Isaiah and Stacks App that benefit from the Stacks App but also obviously the devs, also it is more savvy for one dev to ensure that other devs are part of the promoting as it makes the platform more desirable with a wider choice and capability and generates a wider user base that generates them more custom.
All these points raised, to me seem to be spot on and am in full agreement for the current climate and situation, and also highlights why the split from RW was actually needed separate from March debacle. Stacks and third party stacks naturally evolved in to a bigger beast, the choice is there, create simple clean looking and well functioning websites easily or go nuts with highly advanced capabilities.
Bit like Photoshop, you can use Shadows and Highlights function if you want to do just that simply or you can learn and use contrast masking with blend modes for a more complex and refined process.
I do think Stacks App as in Stacks as it stands now as plugin enables a beginner new to the platform the ability to create a nice website out of the tin, but does not hold somebody back if they want to advance and importantly have fun doing so. Huge strength.
Regarding marketing, I’m very sure that will materialise and will snowball, it’s just all fragmented at the moment and this is all part of the reason for change. I believe it is exciting times.
As in so many things to do with Stacks, Joe has been doing a sterling job for quite a while:
There are some good designs in there, but there are also many dead links and 1 site failed to load with a page or errors, and I recognise many old Foundation sites. Running some through Lighthouse doesn’t tell a great story. Hell, I even found 3 of my sites from about 2015 (although 1 is now built with Source).
I also notice that Joe has been “Voted developer of the year*” on the home page. When did that happen? Who voted? What does the * mean?
Haha, good for him! Joe has his interest here, as I’m sure we all recognise — he’s got a family to feed too — but his unstoppable energy and enthusiasm has sustained RW/Stacks through these last difficult years. He’s not the only person to have contributed significantly, of course, but I think it’s fair to say that without his considerable contribution RW/Stacks would have probably closed its doors. So if we want there to be a positive future for this platform, we all need to be more Joe.
I may not be a great fan of Joe’s marketing and pricing strategies, but I recognize his inventiveness, engagement and sheer amount of output. I agree completely with what @jamessouttar wrote.
That does not mean that I forget other developers and their achievements.
Déjà vu. I was a very happy Softpress Freeway user responsible for building and maintaining our company e-commerce sites since around 2006 or so and active on the forums. In the later years of 2012 to 2015 things started to change as the web matured and changed and Freeway did not. The chatter on the forums was EXACTLY like this discussion. Freeway struggled to keep up and announced this and that, but failed to deliver and keep up. I discovered RW because Joe Workman posted on the Freeway forum about all the goodness of RW. After checking it out and discovering the easy feature rich possibilities we made the switch and rebuilt over 150 pages in RW Foundation 1. Then came Foundation 6 and we were faced with a total rebuild again because Foundation 1 would be history. We switched to Foundry and are soon to launch. We were happy campers. Blocs is very appealing and we are evaluating it closely. I’m now semi-retired and have passed the torch to a much younger capable designer. He’s designed a great site, but the handwriting is on the wall if all the RW/Stacks hype isn’t a blow-me-away change. The other handful of sites I personally maintain are making the switch to Blocs for my retirement fun!
A very interesting thread.
Stacks Pro…it’s going to be a difficult one for Isaiah. In my mind, especially as time goes on, going to have to be more than RW was/is (discounting Elements at the moment as it’s very much a mystery/vapourware until something concrete appears).
It needs to be a really strong standalone web builder, which can do a good site and then some before you have to start buying extra stacks. Not just a shell for existing stacks, although that’ll be a must.
Blocs is a good example of this, a strong base product that can be enhanced with extensions. Stacks has the advantage of a wide, though possibly not centralised enough as others have said, developer base that Blocs doesn’t yet have.
I have a lot of respect for Isaiah but I really think he and Yourhead really need to become more visible and start monitoring RW forums for issues.
It is noticeable on the RW Community forum that some folk are looking for Stacks plug-in help and understandably not getting the support they need, with some very negative comments to that effect. Must say though the new support guy Dan G has been very professional and even handed, really good to see compared to some of the previous help.
Also @isaiah please stop selling Pluskit, it seems to create a lot of bad feeling towards Yourhead due to compatibility issues.
True, if only he’d stop plugging their community in every comment (often dressed with links) on other sites.
The crux is the iron triangle: time, resources and scope. It’s Isaiah and … Isaiah! There are only 24h in a day and he’s been working around the clock. “So he’d need help”, I hear you say, “with programming, support and/or marketing!” He could use some help, but who’s bankrolling that? Oh and of course the wishlist; Stacks Pro should be able to build websites, preferably using a thought interface, travel to the moon, do the dishes and walk the dog… at least! The iron triangle : time, resources and scope… .
Yup I’m aware Yourhead is not a multinational with vast resources, it’s the repultational damage I’m more concerned about.
Until Stacks Pro launches Stacks is very much intertwined with RW. There are more than a few cases where there have been users with Stacks or Pluskit issues, who have tried to contact Yourhead and not gotten an answer. A lack of visibilty and support is not going to encourage people to jump ship to Stacks Pro.